


Grey

by cartographicalspine



Series: The Hearthkeeper [1]
Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Drama, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-19
Updated: 2017-10-20
Packaged: 2019-01-19 12:53:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12410667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartographicalspine/pseuds/cartographicalspine
Summary: A collection of stories about Grey Wardens, in their respective solo storylines, and in one grand, ridiculous All Origins Live AU.





	1. Off-Balance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alistair has come home and yet he hasn't. Not really.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Kiddo" in this story is my Mahariel and usually he'll go by Alistair's nickname for him.

Alistair could have laughed at how easily he’s able to find the kitchens. Instead, he lets his feet guide him around and tries not to think about the man in the bedchambers above. One armload of food joins another on the table, then a third. He drops into the chair by the still-warm fireplace and begins picking at the bread rolls. His stomach grumbles and he stops.

He’s off balance, he knows, but everything’s the same except where it’s not and the Arl is dying and Alistair…

Alistair feels like he’s that same-old, helpless ten again, and this time there isn’t even an amulet to shatter against the wall near Eamon’s head. Then he feels like a bastard for thinking about lobbing things at an old, unconscious person.  _Raised by giant, slobbering dogs, this one._

“From the Anderfels,” he amends under his breath humorlessly. Not even the cheese makes it to his mouth. Damn it, he  _likes_  cheese. “Cheesy slobbery Anderfels spawn.”

“A-Alistair?” The voice at the door comes unhesitant but mid-yawn, so it stutters. “Is that you?”

He looks up to find Kiddo there, rubbing at an eye and nearly swallowed by a borrowed nightshirt. It hits him at the knees and hangs absurdly over one shoulder, but it’s a massive improvement from their first party camp. Elves and their  _au naturel,_  or whatever. Orlesians and their words. Both of them can join the Anderfels dogs.

Which includes Alistair, presumably, if they’re going by his sob story.

Damn it.

“You should be resting,” he says lamely, instead of the other thousand clever comments he can’t find right now. Little quips to make the moment pass so he doesn’t have to think about dark magic and demons and a poisoned chalice in his childhood home. “Because of…”

Instead, he takes in the sight of the bandages peeking out from beneath Kiddo’s shirt, the purple-black bruises on his brown skin. Always jumping in when he shouldn’t, just like when he tore himself away from the not-cursed Dalish clan (not his, but family and home enough anyway) to come mire himself in Alistair’s Eamon-demon problems.

So much for forgetting about the upstairs bedrooms.

Kiddo sits down across from him, still moving too stiffly, and why wouldn’t he, after they held Redcliffe Village through the undead night and charged into its castle to save Teagan and Isolde? After they raced to Kinloch Hold so that the Arl’s family might survive, only to find another crisis and another rescue to stage? Maker, it was like card night if the cards were problems and the betting chips even more problems until everyone dies of demons at the end. Even Alistair is still cringing with every bruised-rib breath he takes, as shallow as he can and it still  _hurts._

“Well, you shouldn’t be up, anyway.” He tries and fails to grin. “We have beds, actual beds tonight. Do you realize this is probably never going to happen again?”

“Do they not have beds in Denerim?” A cracked grin, and damn does Kiddo make it look so easy all the time. He’s unruffled in an endless-boundless way, and even though Alistair wants to be mad he physically can’t. It’s the same with what he says next, the cheeky bastard. “I’d prefer the stables anyway. I heard that’s where they keep the kingly sort.”

“You little stinker…”

Kiddo tucks a strand of hair behind his ear, though sleep mussed as he is, most of it has come out of his long, pretty braid. “I’m a breath of fresh air. Plus, only one of us bathed tonight.”

He dodges the stale bread roll and lands a good one on Alistair’s shoulder. “Against an archer? Alistair, you have the worst-”

Then he’s strangling a shriek with a fist closed around a ruined pastry because Alistair’s got him over his shoulder, and the kitchen is not long a battlefield before both the food and their energy runs out. Good thing, too; the servants are going to lose it.

In the minutes their “battle” lasted, they’ve managed to smear stewed vegetables and chicken grease across the far wall and leave the table covered with crumbs and chaos. The gravy is missing. So much for that late night snack.

Alistair rolls his head back against the wall, blinking black spots from his vision and groaning as something warm and wet spreads along the back of his shoulder. Either a wound reopened or he’s just found the gravy.

Kiddo is pale and peaky looking under all the cream and sauce, but he’s still laughing breathlessly against Alistair’s side. His eyes flit over the mess quickly.

“Nicer than the bloodstains,” he says idly, and Alistair is on his feet before he can help himself. “...it happened, Alistair. Ignoring it doesn’t change that.”

“I know that,” he whispers more than snaps, shocked that his anger is gone before it even began. “I just can’t stop thinking...you saw the fires, the village, the castle. This was my home.”

“I know.”

“...how do you even move on from something like this?”

His eyes are very dark in this light, he thinks, like old forests and very sad, broken civilizations. Or maybe the lighting is just bad. “You could start by picking up the pieces and going from there.”

That is incredibly profound and Alistair could have been moved to tears.  _We did what we could, and now we do what we can._  It’s what the elven clan said after what happened to Zathrian, and what the mages and templars turned to in their broken tower. All that remains is what goes forward, and the rest is just  _done._

Kiddo brushes past him and gingerly extracts a jagged shard of pottery from something that might have been shepherd’s pie. “Really, I don’t think they’re going to be happy about this. Did you have to go for the table?”

Alistair responds with the sole surviving pie on the counter, and Kiddo is true to his instincts and ducks.

It hits home, squarely in the middle of Morrigan’s open-chested robes, where she’s standing like a solid marble statue in the entryway. Kiddo makes a choked noise somewhere in the back of his throat, and Alistair doesn’t soil himself because he’s too busy screaming inside himself.

He’s feeling off-balance once again, careening, but this time Kiddo’s taken his hand and drags him away into the opposite corridor, heaving and crying with laughter. And he’s not thinking about Eamon and past doom and gloom anymore but about impending doom and gloom in the form of shrill-voiced Morrigan with murder in her eyes, and Alistair thinks that’s okay, too.

The moment passes.


	2. Endless Forms

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Amell picks up a new unsanctioned area of study with her newfound freedom.

Shapeshifting, she soon discovers, involves a lot of the exact opposite. Or at least learning it does. Morrigan has her staring at a tiny spider for hours when they make camp, and then hours more staring at the insides of her own eyelids. Leda paces the bounds of her patience within her head for weeks, but she is no closer to a breakthrough than she was when she first came to Morrigan with her request.

“You’re improving,” the other mage says, watching as the spider slips away into the cover of the leaves strewn beneath them. “Despite what you think, you  _are_  getting a better sense for how it moves.”

She sighs and rubs the grittiness from her eyes. “Thinking like it is another matter.”

“You have remarkable dedication. Quite stubborn, actually. One wonders why you are so determined to see this through.”

Leda remembers the Tower and how everything seemed to press in on her (on her body) after Jowan vanished. Her primal spells and her shield flickered into nothing in the face of the nullification glyphs on the cell walls. “I suppose it’s another form of mastery.”

Stretching her arms up over her head, pleased with the way her new robes fall over her body, she continues, “and if it’s something the Circle hasn’t seen…”

Morrigan grins back; their shared disdain for the Circle sets many in their group on edge, but Leda is never going back to feeling so contemptibly  _owned_  ever again. She belongs to herself now.

“What better way to declare your complete break from the Chantry than to dive right into the barbaric witchcraft of the Wilds?” Morrigan moves to feed the fire before her cozy little lean-to, her own magic breathing life into it. “I like the way you think, Leda.”

 _Leda._  How a name manages to change everything. Leda hums softly to herself and pictures a spider’s delicate, twitching dance along its web, over and over again. “Unlike the spider, I assume. If you really wanted someone who would get it, I wonder why you didn’t turn to…”

Morrigan follows her gaze across the campsite, falling on the eerie little glow of a spell wisp somewhere near the opposite treeline. “You  _are_  joking, right?”

“Why not?” Leda knows of no one else who weaves such complex, intricate spells in a way that comes as naturally as breathing. A cold, manipulative web of auras that brought even Irving and Greagoir to a halt when they tried to draw near. “I would have thought he’d take to it like a fish to water.”

“Say he even showed interest in our...esoteric magic. He would not cross that threshold.” Morrigan rubs her hands and brings them up to the flames, but there's a little smile edging on her lips when she glances Surana's way. “Too painfully built into that form to ever leave it. Were he to discover the secrets of his ancestors’ longevity, I would not have the time in the world to be able to coax him out.”

Leda studies his silhouette by the light of the wisp as he pores over his tomes, how he kneels primly even in the mud and dirt, spine a rigid, perfect column, posture like he never left the Circle. In his mind, he probably never will, she thinks, and wonders if she should feel sad about it. “No...I suppose not.”


	3. Ruthless by Design, Insidious in Method

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tule Surana does the unthinkable for his selfish desires.

_Oh, his eyes are blue._

* * *

The nightmares come first, he’ll always remember, those horrible, horrible dreams that have begun to plague them all more insistently. Tule watches them chafe beneath the weight of that shared vision and fights the urge to bite his own lip. Alistair stresses the moment for them, eyes bright with fear as Leda squeezes his hand. _It’s like it_ **_saw_ ** _us._

And then the first hissing whispers break out.

The Shrieks surge from the shadows in nothing short of a coordinated attack. An ambush they barely detect in time, and they leap up in hasty, fumbling counterattack, in undress and desperation. He hates that they did not foresee this.

Though they are numerous and have the advantage of surprise, his comrades quickly come together with weeks of the Deep Roads still echoing in their veins. They symphonize, complement, and their attacks could almost sing for how well they fit in to one another. Cacophonous minutes tick by, and many more of silence follow. They take stock; twice as many corpses as the size of their group, but they took few major injuries themselves.

Fortifications, Sten proposes as Wynne and Leliana lament lost sleep and security. Morrigan and Zevran joke for levity, but their eyes are dark and somber. Oghren complains his exhaustion and fumbles with the cork on his flask. Shale, ever stoic, urges them onward. The horror passes, the horror-

Kiddo’s scream cuts through them like a knife.

The horror is only just beginning.

He’s speaking with a-a...a shambling wretched _creature_ that reminds Tule of poor shattered Ruck, of heartbroken Hespith, and it’s all Kiddo can do to hold himself together. There’s light and joy in his voice, but beneath it he’s cracking, breaking, crumbling. He’s so desperately frightened and hurting in a way they’ve never seen before.

The ghoul is agonizing (is shame and hideousness and self-hatred), is tearing Kiddo across the face with blackened talon-like fingers, and Kiddo reels back screaming and hunched over. Blood drips visible through his fingers even in the weak light of the campfire.

Not a one of them even hesitates to draw their weapons.

 _“NO!”_   he shrieks, throwing himself on top of the fleeing creature, a body between his attacker and his friends. _“Stay away! Don’t you ever touch him! Tamlen, please!”_

Tamlen. Oh, _no._

Horror re-settles on their faces, deeper and more painful than a thousand Shrieks’ claws. Even their non-Wardens see enough to know that this is beyond _spirit healing,_ let alone...no. Kiddo ignores them once they let their stances fall, turning back to Tamlen, pushing insistently through months of torment and Blight-song with grasping, desperate hands.

Tamlen must have fought so hard to reach them in the state he’s in now.

Now, he begs for a release, and Kiddo begs for a lifeline, and none can offer either. Weeping blood and tears alike, Kiddo pleads with the Creators breathlessly as his ghoul writhes and groans beneath him. “-All Mother, _p-please_  Mythal……Leliana, your Maker! Please…”

She shakes her head tearfully, lips already moving in a silent, fruitless prayer.

“Zina, Gry! Th-the Stone, y-your ancestor spirits…”

He sobs helplessly at their stony silence, at the wind that blows indifferently between them. “...a-anyone, please…save him…… _h-h-help me……”_

He’s never been one for prayer, not Tule, but even now he can’t keep Andraste’s name from his lips, not Mythal’s or Sylaise’s for protection ( _they’re only children, Creators_ ), yet they remain as silent as the empty Stone beneath their feet, refusing even the splashes of blood pooled in the dirt, joining. Joining.

And it strikes him then that he’s never once entrusted to gods what he himself could do, and he figures that it might just be the Stone’s and the Creators’ and the Maker’s answer, after all. Plans and designs he can manage.

He shoves past Wynne and Zevran for his pack amidst their things (all piled together after the attack) and finds his hand closing around a tiny chain, Avernus’ gift clinging to it like a prayer. _I like this one, this Tule,_ he’d said in his brittle manner before slipping it quietly into his palm as they departed from Soldier’s Peak.

Tule can live with being Avernus’ shadow.

He turns to the others without expression, as cold as they’ve come to expect from him.

“I’m sorry,” he offers parting words that they won’t realize until later. “I never could stop being what I am. I’m sorry I disappointed you, I couldn’t, I wanted...I-”

_-wanted to travel with you a little longer._

His eyes meet Morrigan’s, and he wonders if she sees in his what he does in hers. _If this is love, then I wish to ascertain that you do not feel the same._

(He’s so glad he lied back then.)

Tule hauls Kiddo off with strength he didn’t know he had and leaves him to Alistair, _don’t ever let him go,_ and returns to Tamlen with his supplies, to what’s left on the edge of corruption and ruin. Then, like hands clasping overhead in supplication, he brings up a protective sheath, and then a shroud that enfolds them in between the Fade and the living.

Everything’s a pale green here, like blossoms in the spring, but the corruption is a bloody black bloom beneath his hands that screams foreboding and punishment.  Tamlen weeps as Tule sends a whisper of sleep to his brow, a faint mercy that he doesn’t know will be enough to save him.

But he has his templates from Zathrian’s insatiable bindings, from Avernus’ sinister research, and he begins to weave his own wicked selfish web upon them. Blood magic, Blight magic, and his own...they all have their useful intersections; the echo of the elven spirit from the ruins frets but fills in where he cannot as he needs. Whether it’s the Joining he’s about to attempt or something vastly more perverse, he will not stop (he cannot afford to) to think about the fists banging on his shield or the screams coming from somewhere above him, as though through water.

Something like thorns begins to tear through his mind, and knives sink deep into his stomach. All over, a dark, relentless prickling creeps its way along his veins and under his skin. He doesn’t lose his rhythm once.

Avernus’ tiny vial cinches it all, and then he’s left waiting to pull the threads tight, to finish the tapestry…and his breath catches in his throat (almost a sob) at the thought of what comes next. Here, in between, he and Tamlen straddle the physical and the Fade and feel the effects of neither, not entirely. But he can only hold this for so long, and Kiddo’s screams still ring in his ears from the surface.

He pushes through.

_-and remember the Fade is a realm of dreams. The spirits may rule it, but your own will is real._

In the Fade, he sees himself over Tamlen’s blistering body, two blossom of light glowing and dark each in their own nature. In the physical world, he’s hovering over a red-black spell with his companions at his back, the arcane shroud separating them beginning to unravel at the top. Spirits are clamoring on both and all sides, but he only has room for this one thing before him right now. They’ll have to wait.

Softly, without meaning to, he begins to hum a matching song to the cacophony surrounding them all. He doesn’t remember forming words, but he’s told they sounded older than anything Chantry-dated. They sounded like long-crumbled empires and golden ancient dust and ink-black voids.

Leda begins screaming harder, so much louder than the others. Later, she’ll say that she remembered parts of the song, from the Joining and their Blight dreams and from Jowan’s desperate outlash; she bursts into helpless tears afterward.

Back in the in-between, his head breaks open for the thorns, and the gouges in his belly deepen and his skin peels back rough, for corruption and malevolence and……

In the Fade, he’s splitting apart for wicked horns and claws, for rotting, sore-covered hide and scales, for the Archdemon’s eyes to stare right back at him like a mirrored twin. He’s never felt so insufficient and yet so profoundly unconquerable. Unafraid of both, he lets it come for him so that Tamlen doesn’t have to.

The spell’s last threads set taut, the song’s final notes linger in every realm and between and……shoulders shaking now, he slides them along with the corruption into their slot at his core before reaching out and pulling Tamlen back _up._

They shatter the surface like glass.

* * *

Muffled voices, muted colors, constant motion. Everything roils and pitches around like seething tidal waves, and the wounded ground barely feels real under his battered body. His face is a dripping, sopping mess, hot and sticky and _red-red-red_ and he really doesn’t know what he was expecting. He feels like one furious bruise, all of him; he can’t remember what he felt like in the Circle (pre-Blight, pre-Duncan, pre-everything) anymore.

But his first true coherent thought is a tiny exclamation of surprise, not exactly happy but still light. Almost blithe. _Oh, his eyes are blue._

Tamlen stares blearily into nothing, skin just on the right side of healthy, blood slowly, ever so slowly filling out his color again. The remainder of something thick and black oozes like molasses down his chin and chest, but his gaze slowly clears, all pain and fever vanished like it had never existed. Then there are brown hands on his face, trembling and fluttering; he’s looking up into Kiddo’s tear-streaked, bloodied face, and finally manages to smile through his own tears.

“H-Hanin…” Tamlen whispers, and they both burst into tears again, foreheads touching, breathless and _light-light-light._ Though everyone’s up in bewildered panic over them, yelling and questioning and so terribly afraid, at the moment, they are the only world that exists to the other.

For Tule, weeping a constant, agonizing red all over again and forgetting if he’s ever _not_ been a shattered, discarded tool, it’s enough.

* * *

Morrigan will not spare him more than a glance since the attack. Wynne couldn’t keep her voice from near-screaming levels when he properly rose, and now she only turns around to glare accusingly. Sten refuses to look at him at all.

Everywhere he listens, the hushed whispers are the same: fearful, suspicious, distant. Touching...it’s almost enough to make an elf feel like he’s back in the Circle proper.

It’s the pity he cannot stand.

Lucky they’re still lingering, barely traveling anymore to allow for Tamlen to recover, because Tule’s entire focus is spent on standing upright and steady when they move. He can hardly bear his armor and has set it aside with his sword in favor of robes again. The patterns from his staff’s grip are just about permanently imprinted on his palm. Even so, he knows they see when he hunches under the strain, when his gait falters, when his vision blackens and he has to pause to gather his bearings.

He will die before stumbling in front of them.

When they’re in camp, he doesn’t have to worry about that, and since they’re at a standstill, he has little more to do than sit and listen.

Alistair, at Leda’s side while she and Morrigan pore over their tiny scavenged library: she breaks in the middle of a paragraph on the Taint and asks him why he didn’t cleanse the area when he realized that...

 _I...I thought about it but_ —but Tule had forced Kiddo into his arms— _I had no idea that...Maker’s breath, Leda. I was scared of what Kiddo would do. I thought he would kill himself to get through._

He’d trusted Tule, is what he won’t say to her, and was repaid with blood magic. Sighing to himself, Tule wonders how he was ever puzzled at how people kept their distance from him.

(Morrigan says nothing and leans over her grimoire instead.)

Aeducan, gathered with the others near the fire, determining with Brosca and Cousland what the group’s next course of action will be. Something slow-cooks over the fire, and they portion it out amongst themselves as it finishes, but he hasn’t had much of an appetite lately.

_Well, is he? A Warden, I mean._

_Andraste’s pissin’ tits, I can’t tell. I’d ask but…_

_Mm, best leave them be for now, the poor dears._

_Thank the Maker for their moments of levity._

Tamlen and...Hanin, that’s right. But he’s always Kiddo to them regardless. Both of them have become inseparable, holding, kissing, simply touching; whispers and laughter in the other’s ear and hours upon days where they cannot stop looking at each other. They cling as though they intend to never let go. Someday the tears that spring to their eyes might become a distant memory, but likely not. They’ve learned too dearly the value of what they have.

(Sometimes, Tamlen will wake up screaming in a cold sweat, and it takes Kiddo hours to get him to calm enough to sleep again. Sometimes, he will spend hours more just resting his ear at Tamlen’s heart, listening and counting and trying to make himself accept the fact that he isn’t dreaming.

Every time, Tule remembers that his was the lesser burden.)

The scores on Kiddo’s face scar over, even with Wynne’s healing, but he tosses his hair and loudly, defiantly owns them. He’s too lovely not to. Tamlen’s brows and hair grow back quickly, almost like...hm, magic; soon he and Kiddo are out of bed and raring to go.

They are going to prove to be a handful.

* * *

Today, they’re tumbling over their bed rolls, wrestling and shouting laughter that settles the terrible buzzing in Tule’s head, as strange as that might sound. He rests his back against a gnarled trunk, letting the plants he gathered and laid out earlier dry next to him, supplies to replenish what he spent on that spell. One of his journals sits in his lap, open to the new notes he's making on the ritual and its herbal preparations, but his hand struggles with the quill and he eventually lets it sit a while between his fingers as he works out what will next go on the page. He doesn’t know how, but in the span of closing his eyes, just a brief moment, and re-opening them, the sun drops below the treeline.

There’s a blanket over his shoulders.

“How have their jaws not tired of all that smiling?” Zevran says wonderingly; upon noticing Tule’s gaze on him, he chuckles. “Perhaps they’ve frozen like that forever! Imagine when they require anything other than a great big grin on those adorable faces.”

He wishes he had the energy to laugh. “Zevran—”

Zevran shakes his head, a hand raised to stop him. “I know we haven’t always gotten along, and I know perhaps you think you can manage alone, but I believe you need this.”

He nods at Kiddo and Tamlen, curled up together by the fire with steaming hot mugs in their hands. “What you did for them...no one can say that this is wrong. Morrigan, Zinaita, even Wynne adores them more than she abhors how we got here, however rude they may be about it.”

Zevran doesn’t bring up Sten, but everyone is fairly certain that he’s planning on hauling Tule back to Par Vollen in chains at this point, perhaps with some first-rate thread and delightful Qunari needlework to start off. Tule just thinks he’s hunting about for a solid greatsword to skewer him on; Asala is too good for his filthy beast’s blood. The thought is nicer than lamenting that particular burned bridge.

“You scoff, I see, but I only speak the truth. They _are_ happy, all of them, whether or not they let it show and regardless of what they will tell you to your face.”

Oh, and have they had things to say to him. Wynne’s censure, Morrigan’s silence, everyone’s fear. Sten’s terrified revulsion. He’s heard them loud and clear.  

“I myself have only one thing to say: _Thank you._ From the bottom of my heart, thank you for them. I thought you deserved to hear that.”

He’s tired, he hurts all over, and probably always will. He's ruined his eyes, not that they were ever anything to write poetry for, but now they’re rimmed in red and ache constantly. His arms are scarred by the Taint and he feels an accompanying throb in his chest every time he moves anything on his right side, and everyone has been so angry or disappointed or scared that he’s given up on wishing it to change.

But Kiddo and Tamlen are laughing together in the distance, and the others are slowly warming to the changes in their traveling party, and there’s no fear in their eyes when they look at the pair at all...and the pressure behind his eyes lessens.

“I would do it again,” he finally admits out loud, and Zevran’s smile widens and saddens at the same time. “I’d made up my mind, and I would do it over as many times as the choice was presented to me, but you are very kind to speak as you have.”

Immensely, _immensely_ kind. “...I’m truly grateful.”

“Not just words, my stalwart friend.” Zevran clicks his tongue and gives the blanket a light tug. “Now, tuck that in a bit...yes, just so. It’s rather nippy tonight, and you doubtlessly need it more than I.”

Tule notches it a little tighter with his good hand and can’t help the thin smile that comes to his face. “I’m stalwart now, am I?”

“You did not take well to handsome, as I recall.” He sits back to look at his handiwork, nodding his approval. “See, the color returns to you yet. And is it...yes! A smile! I look upon a rare gem indeed.”

“I have been many things, but ‘handsome’ and ‘a rare gem’ are not among them.” It’s a testament to his exhaustion that he doesn’t even remember to feel embarrassed at being swaddled like a child, but he’ll deal with that later. He rolls his eyes at Zevran’s “only you could wear disdain this well” and says, “Come back in a year and try pulling that on what’s left of me.”

Zevran sobers immediately, though he tries admirably to keep his tone light. “Do not speak like this, such...fatalistic things.”

“This coming from the Crow assassin who decided to take on eight Grey Wardens and company with a handful of hired thugs?” He crooks a brow and gleans satisfaction from Zevran’s false indignation, as childish as it is. It’s been hard to find satisfaction these days, so as Zevran begins some speech or other about his very... _logical_ reasons for the disastrous ambush, Tule settles against the tree and lets his voice wash over his tired mind. It’s astoundingly soothing.

His eyelids grow heavy again as they speak, and he only remembers snapping half-heartedly at Zevran’s gentle, teasing remark on it. _Don’t mother me, I just need a moment._

But if anything, he’s terribly proud of the fact that he made it to bed of his own volition that night, no leaning or helping hands required. Small victories, these.

* * *

They’re packing up the camp, finally, and as he’s stubbornly preparing himself to shoulder his pack, a voice he’s grown even fonder (if possible) of hearing these last weeks calls out across the clearing.

“Hahren!”

And a second, shyer voice, still weak from the ordeal and unsure about where he stands with the group: “So...H-Hahren? Is that okay?”

Tamlen looks at him with hesitation and hope in his blue eyes, and Kiddo’s eyes are incredibly bright as he glances back and forth between them, breath held nervously.

Tule lets a beat hit before answering: “I’ll accept anything from ‘Hahren’ to ‘His Pointy, Frigid Enchantership.’ You could hardly offend me now, Tamlen.”

From the next tent over, Leda gives a high-pitched, horrified giggle. _And our Circle apprentices still think their enchanters don’t hear them, the little shits._

Tamlen whistles low, glancing side-eye at Kiddo while nodding his approval. “I like him.”

“I _knew_ it.” But then Kiddo’s grabbing at his hands, rubbing soft circles across his palms as though he’ll feel it through the gloves. “......I’m sorry. I’m so, _so_ sorry. I’m so thankful you did, but I’m so sorry for all of this. If there had been……I wish you hadn’t—”

Tule cuts him off before he can finish. _How did you not see this coming?_ he berates himself silently. “I cannot regret it, and I do not wish you to, either. Please, don’t. I’m _happy_ I did it.”

He shares his smile with the both of them. “For you two, I am very, indescribably happy that I did.”

Kiddo throws his arms around him then, and Tule’s body screams anew with a fresh wave of fiery, tearing pain, but he’s sobbing hymns of _thank-you_ and _I-love-you_ in his ear and those seem more important right now. Those mean everything. Damn the others’ dumbfounded stares and hesitation, his exhaustion and pain, the general fuckery of the whole situation.

This is the most important thing in Tule’s life, and he raises both aching arms to hold it tight.


End file.
